Posts Tagged ‘Patrick Bateman’

So it’s 9:38 according to the clock in the corner of my laptop, and I’m writing this post from work (WordPress is blocked by the NHS so I’m writing it now and will post it up this evening when I get home… by which time the future tense will be present) because I am conscious that as I’m staying with my grandmother so that on her return from Italy, she’s not immediately in an empty house, I wouldn’t be able to blog. I started work at 8:30, and less than an hour later, I’m already bored and without very much (read: nothing) to do. I have tweeted from my phone (Twitter is also blocked at work! Damn those pesky IT people) and texted Hannah; I am listening to Brandy (Never Say Never) on my iPod with Mariah Carey (Rainbow) queued up; I am going to gaze at my Gucci bracelet and possibly email a picture of it to my parents in Barcelona, because they taunted me over the phone by telling me how many designer boutiques they had been past. No need to rub it in!

So writing this blog post in advance is tantamount to me killing time, which seems to be a lot of what I do at work these days! (As I type, one of my colleagues is demonstrating his juggling skills, so it’s obviously not just me. 😉 ) It’s certainly a step up from my previous job, where there was always a sense of urgency for rarely a legitimate reason, but it dawns on me that often, what we do in life is kill time. Reading American Psycho on the bus, Patrick Bateman describes how he spent the majority of his summer “in a stupor, sitting either in my office or in new restaurants, in my apartment watching videotapes or in the backs of cabs, in nightclubs that just opened or in movie theatres or in new restaurants.” Basically, we distract ourselves by doing things which seem “special” to fill up the time, except we spend so much time socialising or going places to socialise or entertaining ourselves, it’s depressing when I start to think how little we actually accomplish that matters. What am I trying to do with my life? Well, I work to save up money so that I can buy jewellery – as much as looking good is important to me, and as much as making yourself feel special is something that cannot be underrated, it hardly matters in the scheme of making an impact on the world. I save up money so that I can have driving lessons to get a car so I can travel. Okay, that’s important in terms of job skills and life skills. I am starting university on Monday to gain a qualification in Careers Guidance, so that I can help younger people realise what their options are, both educational and vocational, in order to get to where they want to be. That does count as making an impact. In the meanwhile, the only other important thing I do that could potentially touch and enrich people’s lives is my music, writing and producing and singing songs, practising piano and guitar so that I can accompany myself, and lately completing my album booklet and taking pictures of myself and photoshopping moody dark/neon scapes to complement the whole mood of the album. I guess that I am trying to enrich my life at the same time as trying to touch other people’s lives and make a difference, and there is nothing wrong with that.

But it’s how much time we kill in between doing those things. I mean, nobody, not even Beyoncé, can work 24/7, and we all need some down time and some “us time” and we all have the right to enjoy our lives and have some fun. Not everything is so serious, and as I’m growing older I’m learning to realise that more and take things a little easier when it’s okay to do so. In between laundry and checking on my nan’s house and turning on the fridge and watering the plants yesterday, I watched a few dvds and ate Dominos pizza. But the amount of time we waste is just insane, because we don’t even realise that we’re doing it. And yet, talking to Ebony on Monday, I was talking about the unspoken pressure put on us by older generations that although I am 23 and she is 24, we should have managed university and got a steady job and be on the way to buy a house and drive and be looking to get married in the near future. The world is a different place now, and the economy means that jobs and money and affordable decent places to live aren’t as easy to come by as they once were. I consider myself lucky to have finally escaped retail and got a position in an office where I feel comfortable, am better paid and often do a lot less 😉 I also get to use my brain a lot more, and I feel more valued because of that. But there is a tension between it being okay to kill time, and then a sense of urgency that before we know it, we will be 30 and single and still living at home and a failure at life. Please! I have no intention of letting that happen, and although sometimes life happens beyond your control and deals you a bad hand, I’m determined to make a bid for independence and career success very soon. I am making moves towards that with my new university course and increase in money, which will hopefully get me a driving licence and a qualification with real job prospects come the end of the next academic year. But it’s hard to keep a sense of urgency in perspective when it’s also so easy just to kill time and do things which seem unavoidable but are semi-unnecessary. I don’t know where to find that balance or how to achieve it, but at least I know it needs to be done.

It’s come to the point where I look forward to my dreams to see what twisted scenario my brain is going to spit out at me while I’m sleeping. When I wake up and I either haven’t had a dream (to my knowledge), or I already know that I have forgotten it, I feel somewhat frustrated and cheated, although there’s nothing I can do. But the past couple of weeks, as you’ll know if you’ve been checking in here from time to time, I’ve been having an extraordinary string of weird, convoluted dreams. Last night’s was more a reversion to type, where I had been with my mother and my nan in town, except for some reason I had to catch the bus up to my nan’s house by myself. I remember I was smoking at the bus stop, anxiously scanning the streets to make sure that I wasn’t caught by my family. The bus was taking an extremely long time to turn up, and just before it did, this girl from school that I used to know, called Kate Noble, appeared and began to stalk me, circling the bus stop and grinning in my face (in a creepy way).

I thought I had shaken her off when I got on the bus, which looked more like a coach. The driver indicated that the only free seat was the one directly behind him (right at the front) so I sat there, only to discover that Kate was sat behind me, wearing a knitted black shawl around her head and shoulders so as to make her look like a creepy gypsy, with her heavy black eye makeup and violet lipstick with blinding white teeth. She kept trying to steal things from me (at one point, the driver of the bus turned round and indicated to me that she had stolen my gold and silver ring, a plastic piece of jewellery my father had bought me as a misguided Christmas present a few years ago), and after a while I turned around and started threatening her to leave me alone, I swore at her and called her a cunt, and she just laughed at me. That was about it, although I remember a knife being involved, though I’m not sure if I tried to kill her or if she intended to murder me.

I often have dreams where I’m being stalked, where there is a murderer or killer or evil person chasing me for some reason. I have always loved horror movies, and when I was a child I used to watch the murder mysteries and movies that my mother would tape from the nights before. Looking back, I guess I was quite young to be watching those kinds of things, but I only occasionally got scared and I found the stories quite exciting and absorbing, as well as psychologically stimulating. Trying to work out who the killer was, what motivated them to do what they did and their methods was like a detective game for me, and I look back fondly on those times I shared with my mum watching programmes in the mornings when I was off from school. I never felt like I couldn’t handle watching even the scariest films, and it’s come to the point where none of my friends want to watch a large part of my DVD collection because I have a lot of twisted, scary films.

During my waking hours, watching these kinds of thing doesn’t affect me in the slightest, so perhaps my dreams are a manifestation of that? Not to get all Freudian, but it would make sense if the violent and twisted things that I watch are replicated (in a more abstract way) in the dreams that I have, because luckily in reality I have yet to be stalked by a serial killer or be fleeing from my family who had been turned into vampires or even be followed by a compulsive thief. Right now, I am watching American Psycho, because I am about a third of the way through Bret Easton Ellis’ book and loving it, so I wanted to revisit the film. The main character, Patrick Bateman, is quite twisted and yet extremely hollow, actively conforming to a yuppie stereotype and exhibiting no further ambition beyond collecting money, designer clothes and achieving a perfect physique; his addiction to hardcore pornography and penchant for violently murdering beautiful girls is perhaps the most edgy thing about his life which is a qualified success beyond all measure, and yet an utterly heartless and one-dimensional façade. Perhaps this is why he has developed this irresistible urge to violate, to cause pain and end people’s lives… it’s the most impactful thing that he can do, although the impact is obviously negative.

Despite this, the film is hilarious at the same time as its ideas are interesting and vaguely shocking. I recognise a world where you are supposed to achieve a checklist of things in order to be “successful” or “happy”: car, well-paid job, trendy social circle, relationship, house… These are all things that I genuinely want, but at the same time I don’t have complete faith that once I’ve achieved these things, I will be any happier than I am now. I think that most of us seek a way to achieve our wildest dreams while also working towards a more realistic success – one doesn’t necessarily negate the other, but there comes a point where we choose one over the other. Because not everyone can be famous, most of us go for a realistic, modest version of happiness which is possibly more stable; but either way, nobody knows how much happiness lies at the end of the journey. I guess that nobody wants to be predictable or mundane, so we search for ways to make us edgy. Rather than murdering or raping people (as does Patrick Bateman), I choose to have killer fashion sense and make my own music (that’s also in pursuit of achieving my dreams of being a singer, so I try to keep my dreams alive while living an everyday life). That’s the way that I set myself apart from others, even in my own head. We all have our own ‘thing’, I guess…

But at the end of the day (I don’t know if this is true in American Psycho the book, as I haven’t even gotten halfway through it yet), it remains to be seen whether it truly satisfies us. All I want, which is part of the reason why I want to entertain, why I love to sing and create music, why I want to be a Careers Adviser for my more ‘realistic’ vocation, is to make a difference to people’s lives, to have an impact on society, to be important and remembered; to matter. I guess that Patrick Bateman is driven to choosing to murder people (I know it is a paradox to be “driven to choose to do something” but it’s the best, most immediate way I can think of to express how we are at once responsible and moulded by society and environment for the choices that we make) in the same pursuit : to break away from mundane ordinary life, and to make an unforgettable impact. I hope to do the same, but in a more positive and less damaging, psychopathic way!!! I hope that my dreams just stay as dreams, because they are exciting, interesting and yet utterly harmless. I guess that I enjoy Street Fighter IV in the same way – it’s edgy, violent and satisfying, but it’s just a game and I have no desire (96% of the time) to kick anyone’s face in. I suppose all I am trying to say is that while murder is inexcusable, I can also see how current society, employment and the hierarchies which exist within each can drive somebody apparently successful and balanced to do shocking and unbalanced things. I just hope to do things which shock people in a good way, rather than in a bad (or illegal) one.